


Nothing Broken Nothing Thrown

by Shoshanna Gold (shoshannagold), shoshannagold



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, OFC - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-25
Updated: 2010-08-25
Packaged: 2017-10-14 05:20:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/145803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shoshannagold/pseuds/Shoshanna%20Gold, https://archiveofourown.org/users/shoshannagold/pseuds/shoshannagold
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you hear something late at night/Some kind of trouble, some kind of fight/Just don't ask me what it was/Just don't ask me what it was (<i>Luka</i> by Suzanne Vega)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing Broken Nothing Thrown

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Team Night for the [GK Battle](http://community.livejournal.com/combat_jack/1399.html). My prompt was _Fighting hole - Defensive position dug into the ground; can be dug for one Marine, a pair, or a weapon crew; formerly known as a 'foxhole'._
> 
> Thanks so much to perpet_fic for setting new beta speed records on this! Much love and thanks to lunasky for being the best co-captain ever. The whole challenge was her idea and I learned a lot working on it with her! And, as always, huge thanks to mydocuments, because without her I'd never finish a single story.

They were out of milk, so Brad stopped by the grocery store after surfing. As he was walking back to his car, he saw a young woman struggling to get a full water cooler bottle into the back of her SUV. She was clearly having a hell of a time, judging by her cursing – as he got closer, he could tell that her language would make any Marine proud.

"Give you a hand there, ma'am?" he asked, stopping a couple of feet away from her, enough so that he would appear helpful, not threatening. He tended to loom at the best of times: his sisters called him Lurch.

She startled and the water jug slipped from her hands. Without thinking, Brad shifted his grocery bag to his left hand and stepped forward to catch it before it feel and smashed against the ground. "Oh, God," the woman gasped. "Thank you. That would have been such a mess."

"No problem." Brad said. He hefted the jug, getting a better grip on it, and then motioned to the open back of the vehicle. "May I?"

She stepped back. "Please. I'm usually okay with them, but today …" she trailed off. "Well, it's so hot," she said.

It was, indeed. It was 95 degrees, at least, and probably even hotter in the parking lot; Brad thought he could see the heat radiating off the asphalt. Yet she was wearing a long-sleeved shirt buttoned up to the neck. It was loose and gauzy, but she still had to be as hot as hell. He might have thought it was a religious thing, if she wasn't also wearing shorts that showed a fair amount of leg – and they were nice legs, long and smooth and tan – and strappy, heeled sandals, her toenails were painted a bright purple. Definitely not a religious thing.

Most other men would have taken their time making these observations and probably appeared to be leering, but Brad had been trained to take in as much information as he could in a split-second. In fact, he'd realized just before she'd lost her hold on the water bottle that he knew her.

"It is hot," he said agreeably. "I don't know if you remember, ma'am, but we've met before, at Camp Margarita's Memorial Day picnic. You were there with your husband, I think." The picnic had been two days after Brad had officially returned to duty at Pendleton, his two year exchange with the RM complete. It had been rife with new Marines and their families, and Brad's ability to recall names and faces had been put to the test. Good to know he still had it.

She stepped back, and looked even more shaken than she had while when the water slipped. "You know Jeff?"

"Yes, ma'am. He's in my company."

She took a breath, and Brad was impressed as she shook off whatever had shocked her a moment before. She stepped forward and offered her hand, and looked at him more closely. "Gunnery Sergeant Colbert, right? I'm so sorry about this, sir; I'm not usually this much of a mess."

"You're not in my command, Mrs. Stowe. Call me Brad," he said, shaking her hand. Her grip was soft, and he thought she might have winced when he took her hand but the dark glasses that covered most of her face made it hard to see her expression.

She smiled and nodded. "Brad, it's nice to see you again. And please, call me Marlie."

"It's a pleasure to run into you again, Marlie." He nodded at the other two water bottles in her grocery carriage. "Why don't I help you get those stowed?"

"I'd very much appreciate that," she said. She lifted her arm to wipe sweat from her forehead, and Brad was grateful for the aviator shades that hid his own eyes, because he couldn't help the wince as her sleeve fell back to her elbow. It was barely for an second, as she pulled it back down reflexively, but she was exposed long enough for him to see that her arm was covered with ugly bruises, mottling black and green and purple.

Some of them were large, like she'd been punched on the back of her arm and Brad realized with a sickened lurch in his gut that she probably got them as she had lifted her arms to protect her face. Her defensive maneuvers had failed, he noted as he casually took off his own sunglasses to rub his eyes. Without their shade, he could better see through her dark lenses. Both of her eyes were black and swollen.

He slipped his glasses back on and smiled at her, picking up another jug of water. "We'll get you all squared away, Marlie."

*

Ray was working at the kitchen table when Brad got home the next day, his fingers flying over his keyboard at a million strokes a minute as he read from one of many books scattered around him. He looked up when Brad came in. "Hey! Where you been? I'm fucking starving, but I wanted to wait for you."

"Something came up at work," said Brad.

Ray didn't look impressed. "And they couldn't take care of it without you? I know that you can leap tall buildings in a single bound, Brad, and freeze bad guys with just your icy glare, but even God rested on the freaking seventh day, and you just pulled three weeks of duty, so you leaving on time just once shouldn't be that hard. Or should I change your nickname to Atlas, as you seem forever condemned to bear the weight of First Recon on your shoulders?"

"I like it when you compare me to gods, even pagan ones," said Brad, getting two bottles of beer from the fridge. There was a bottle of vodka in the freezer. He could almost feel the glacier-cold liquid sliding down his throat and burning in his belly, but Ray had an exam tomorrow and Brad didn't want to drink alone. Beer didn't count: Ray could drink a six-pack tonight and still kick total ass tomorrow.

"Yeah, well, Atlas got turned to fucking stone because Medusa felt fucking sorry for him. I'm not sucking your cock if you get turned into a rock. That would be fucking hell on my jaw."

"Explain to me again how, when you are doing an honors program in Computer Engineering with some dabbling in Comm Tech, not to mention the 20-odd hours a week that you work at the gym, you still have enough free credits to take courses in Greek mythology? And even with the credits, where do you find the time?" Brad popped the cap off both bottles with the opener on his Swiss Army knife. They had a proper opener somewhere, but Brad was too tired to go looking.

"I am a man of wide and diverse interests, Brad, and my advisor respects that."

"I'm going to have to talk to him," said Brad. He put a beer down in front of Ray, leaning down to kiss him at the same time, his free hand sliding down Ray's chest and unbuttoning his shorts. "I'll tell him that the more you know, the more of a pain in the ass you become, and that all this extra credit is detrimental to your ability to focus. Your grades might slip, Ray."

"And he'd point to the Dean's list, which I have made every semester, and tell you that you're full of shit. In fact, let me save you a trip to campus and the trouble of trying to get an appointment with him: you're full of shit. Although it might be more effective to wait until you're actually listening to me instead of trying to strip me down in the middle of the kitchen."

Brad slowly pulled Ray's zipper down and paused before sliding his hand into Ray's shorts. "Do you want me to stop?"

"Fuck, no." Ray leaned back and pulled Brad's head down to his, kissing him as Brad slowly palmed his soft cock.

"No skivvies, Ray. For shame."

"It's too fucking hot for underwear, dude."

"I hope it's not too hot to fuck on the kitchen floor," said Brad, pulling his hands out of Ray's lap and straightening to strip off his blouse, carefully laying it over the chair beside Ray's. He was too fucking tired to even think about ironing tonight.

"That's why we put in tile," said Ray, standing up and stripping out of his own shirt and shorts. "Nice and cool, though it's going to fuck up your knees if we make a habit of it. Take off your pants and boots, Marine: we're not making a cheap-ass gay porn flick here."

"Roger that," said Brad, sitting down in the chair, taking a second to watch Ray's ass as he walked over to the cupboards. He divested himself of the rest of his uniform quickly, though he made sure he folded his pants and set them out of potential harm's way. He was fucking serious about not ironing.

Ray put the lube on the table and stood in front of him, tilting his head like he was considering a math problem. He grinned and crawled on top of Brad, straddling him. "I just thought of a way to do this without fucking up anybody's knees," he said, kissing Brad again. "You have to admit that I'm fucking brilliant, dude. Or maybe just brilliant at fucking"

"I bow down to your fucking genius," said Brad, putting on hand on Ray's back to support him. "You think the chair is up for this?"

Ray looked it over and nodded. "Metal legs, good weight distribution. It should be fine." He smirked at him. " 'Sides, I'm on top. So it won't be my ass that's full of splinters if there's a problem."

Brad swatted him with his free hand, and then pulled him even closer, closing his eyes with pleasure as their cocks rubbed together. "Gonna fill your ass with something else," he said, reaching for the lube.

*

"What the fuck is eating your ass, Brad? Fuck, dude, we had kick-ass sex in the kitchen, so bonus points for dirty and kinky, especially when you came all over the counter top. And then I let you dunk me in the pool, which I know you love doing because sometimes you're just a great big twelve year-old. Dinner rocked, because I grill a mean salmon, and now you've got a free evening with your Ray-Ray. I maybe have to study for another half-hour, but I don't think that warrants you sitting in the corner, glowering at your screen like it's Griego withholding batteries."

Brad looked up from his laptop. "I'm sitting in the corner of the sofa, Ray, it's not like I'm on the floor with my back to the wall. And you're sitting in the other corner, so how is this a problem, exactly?"

"Semantics," Ray said dismissively. "And don't change the subject. What's going on in that overly-analytic head of yours?"

Brad pursued his lips and thought for a minute. "Your dad ever hit your mom?"

Ray shook his head, a little too quickly. "Nah, he was a drunk, but he was a funny drunk. Their fights were like class five hurricanes, but nobody ever came out of them with anything more than severe emotional wounds."

Brad considered that. Ray wasn't telling him everything. There was something in his demeanor that spoke to something more than some hollering. "But?" he prompted.

"But after they split up, my mom moved in with a guy who knocked her around some." Ray looked down at his laptop again, not meeting Brad's eyes. "He didn't stick around very long."

Ray's tone was not inviting; with anybody else Brad wouldn't have pried any further. "What happened?"

Ray looked up at him, eyes dark and serious in a way Brad had seen very few times, like when they'd buried Horsehead. "I was home alone with him one day and he knocked me around some, too."

"What did he do to you?" Ray had been a Marine for seven years, six of them in Recon, and his body bore the many marks and scars that were testament to his service, and to a life lived on the edge. Brad knew some of them intimately, like the burn on the back of his neck from a shell off Walt's .50 cal, the knife wound from a bar fight Ray had helped him break up in TJ, the way three of his toes were twisted after a ten-hour march in new boots broke them. He knew the rest of them by touch, even if he didn't know their histories, and he resisted the urge to move over to Ray's corner and make him show the remnants of injuries that had healed twenty years ago.

Ray shrugged. "Backhanded me until I was down – I was only seven, and a total fucking runt; it didn't take much to put me down – and then kicked me about some. He was wearing cowboy boots – he kept making stupid cracks about how he was wearing shitkickers to kick around a little shit." Ray's mouth twisted in what might have been an attempt at an ironic smile, but even he couldn't pull it off, not about this. "He cracked a rib, probably, and I was pissing blood for a couple of days."

"Jesus, Ray." Brad stared at him. He had been tamping down a cold, burning rage ever since he'd run into Marlie, and it flared high and bright for a minute. He pushed it down again: boiling over wouldn't help anything right now. He realized his hands were clenched into fists and slowly opened them, flexing his fingers and taking a deep breath. "You never told me this before?"

"Fuck off, Brad, it's not like we sit around and share sob stories about our childhoods. Like I said, my mom didn't stay with him long. That was about the end of it, actually. Because my dad found out, and he told her that if she wanted to stay with an asshole that knocked her around, that was her business, but if he touched me again, my dad would get full custody and move us out of state. So that's my sad story of childhood abuse. I don't imagine anybody in the Colbert house ever went after a loved one with their fists or their flip-flops?"

"No," Brad shook his head. "My mother threw a dinner roll at my father one night, after he told her he voted for Bush in the '88 election. It hit him in the head, but it was soft, it's not like it even hurt. It was shocking, especially to her, and we had to have a family meeting about how you didn't ever try to hurt people you love."

Ray grinned. "They're such fucking hippies," he said fondly.

They really were. "That was about the extent of it," Brad said. "I don't think any of us even got spanked, and if there was ever a kid who deserved a good licking, it was me. But they just revoked privileges: the beach, the pool, television, video games, the phone. When we got older, they wouldn't let us use the car. That was mostly my sisters: by then I was a model cadet." He grinned, thinking back. "The week before they sent me to military school I was basically sitting in a bare room with nothing but a copy of _War and Peace_ to read. And I only had that because my sister felt sorry for me. She was going through a Russian phase. I was lucky: a month earlier and it would have been fuckin' Jane Austen."

"So if we aren't talking about this because you have some deeply buried childhood angst you need to express, why are we talking about this?"

"One of my Marines is beating his wife."

"Jesus fuck," Ray took a deep breath. "Are you fucking sure, Brad? Because that's just – we don't fucking do that."

"I'm sure." He told Ray about running into Marlie in the parking lot, about how she was dressed, the new bruises over old ones that he'd seen on her arms, her black eyes. The way she'd clearly been terrified when she found out he was one of Jeff's COs, and how she'd done her best to keep their short conversation away from her husband.

"I think running into me, or somebody like me, is her worst nightmare. I remember them at the picnic. They came late, left early, and he didn't let go of her the entire time. I don't think she said more than hello to anybody," said Brad. "I should report it, but I think it'll only make things worse for her."

Ray snorted. "Hard to imagine the Corps getting something like this right. I don't remember much from that course I had to take about personnel issues when I made sergeant, but I think they deploy a platoon of do-gooders to the house before they even think about taking disciplinary action."

Brad shook his head. "I'm not siccing them on her until I know more."

Ray looked at him for a minute. "You don't have to fix this yourself," he said finally. "She hasn't asked for your help; she probably doesn't even want it. And, yeah, the POGs in charge of this shit will probably fuck around some before they fix things, but they do manage to get it right now and then."

"I have to do something," said Brad. "Either I fix it for her or I beat her fucking husband until he's brain dead and breathing out a tube for the rest of his life." His voice shook as he finally let out the rage he'd been pushing down for the last two days. "I pulled his file today. Outstanding performance reports, which I expected, but his psych evals are borderline. He's either the perfect Marine or the perfect sociopath and you know how those lines get blurred."

"Yeah," Ray said, taking a deep breath. He did that now when he considered a problem, whether it was about quantum physics or how to get Brad to checkmate when they play chess. It was a new tic, something that started in the two years that Brad was away, one of the many little ways that Ray changed in that time, all of which add up to a new version of Ray. Still mouthy, still completely bent, but with a new maturity. Sometimes Brad worried that Ray wouldn't have grown up if Brad hadn't taken off, that he had somehow been holding him back all those years. And then he thought about Ray at 19, his first few days in Recon, and Ray at 22, when they first went into Afghanistan. Ray had been changing all the time, it was just that before Brad had been changing with him.

"So, okay, you clearly aren't going to fuck him up. I know you want to, and, dude, I'd be there holding him down for you. But one fucker isn't worth your career, especially this steaming piece of pig shit. Not to mention that it would completely destroy your Iceman rep, and then I wouldn't get to gross out Walt by telling him how frosty your cock is. You've got to consider my needs here, too." Ray grinned at him, and it was the same grin Brad had seen for years, loopy, crazy, and cocky as all hell. "But there's no denying that girl needs help, and since you're Recon's only remaining super-hero, you get swoop down and save her."

"Thank you, Ray, for your helpful analysis of this clusterfuck," said Brad, rolling his eyes. "How do I save her, asshole?"

Ray shrugged. "I dunno, man. Why don't you ask her that?"

Huh. That might be the best possible course of action, and one Brad hadn't thought of in the two days that he'd been obsessing about this. Brad nodded, and Ray grinned at him, differently than he had last time, much more lasciviously, and pushed his books to this side, standing up. "Good. Now that we've settled that, let's go to bed. I've got an exam tomorrow, and I think what I truly need to ace it is a blow job and a good night's sleep."

"What did you do about the blow job while I was gone?" Brad asked, raising his eyebrows. "There are quite a few semesters of good grades that I didn't blow you through."

"My hand and my imagination, like I did for everything else for two years. I've got a fucking good imagination, Brad. Something else you should be grateful for. In fact, I'm gonna make a list of all the awesome things about me that you can tack to your bulletin board at work. I'll do it in code, even, so we don't upset the DADT Nazis, but it's clear that you need a refresher course in Ray-Ray." All the while that Ray was talking, he was puttering around the house, turning off lights, turning on the dishwasher, following the same routine Brad imagined he'd followed the two years that he'd been gone.

He didn't regret his two years with the RM. After OIF, he'd needed to get away from the Corps for a while. Even then, after living through every single fuck-up they'd experienced in Iraq, he'd loved it too much to leave it entirely. But all the while he'd been gone, Ray had been here, getting out of the Marines, going to school, taking care of the home they shared. Brad had missed so much of that life, and it struck him how much he wanted to catch up. He wasn't sure he ever would, but he'd damn well try.

*

Given how skittish Marlie had been at the grocery store, Brad thought it was probably best to get rid of Jeff for a couple of days before he approached her. In some kind of fucking miracle, the Corps' agenda aligned with his own wishes: Bravo was scheduled to go on a deep sea training mission for three days. Brad was inclined to let his TLs run their own teams, in contact with HQ as need be, and his CO agreed with him.

He checked and double-checked that they were ready to conduct the op on their own until Hasser said to him, "You're being a fuckin' mother hen, Brad. You gonna hold our cocks on our way to the head, too?" He only grinned when Brad threatened to NJP him. Spend six months in a Humvee with a man and he thinks he can give you lip and get away with it.

He watched them shove off from the docks, following their progress for as long as he could see them. It was a night op, and McGilbert had already gone home. "Call my cell the minute there's any trouble out there," he instructed the petty officer monitoring their progress. She just nodded, already listening intently to their radio traffic, and Brad left.

The Stowe's house was down on the beach, only a few blocks from where Brad and Ray lived. It wasn't a low-rent neighborhood and he wondered how they could afford it on Stowe's salary. Family money, like Brad, or maybe Marlie had a high-paying job. The sun was just settling into the ocean when he got there, and he walked around back to take in a minute of the sunshine from the public beach. When he turned back to the Stowe house, he made out a figure sitting on the deck in the dark. He waved and approached slowly, calling out a greeting as he got closer. Marine's wives' tended to be armed, especially when they were on their own, and most of them were crack shots.

"Gunnery Sergeant Colbert?" Marlie called out as she turned on the flood lights. She didn't sound happy to see him. "Well, now that you're here, you may as well come up."

He did. Like the other day, he was wearing a t-shirt and flip-flops, his jeans ragged and torn at the knee. She looked him over. "They don't make you wear a uniform when you're an SNCO? Rank has privilege, and all that?"

"I'm off-duty, ma'am. This is purely a social call," Brad said, as friendly as he could be.

She shook her head. "I doubt that very much," she said. "But I've been expecting you to show up with a platoon of social workers for three days now, so I'll take what I can get. Would you like some lemonade?"

"If that's what you're having, sure."

"We shouldn't really be on the deck, actually," said Marlie. "The neighbors aren't home now, but they will be, and they're friends with Jeff."

He looked at her closely in the brightly lit kitchen. The bruising around her eyes and on her arms seemed to have gone down, their colors less violent, and he didn't see any new marks.

"Figured me out, did you?" she asked wryly, handing him a glass of lemonade. "He doesn't usually hit me so that it shows. He just lost control that night; I can't ever remember what set him off anymore. It might not have been anything: that's usually when it's the worst. Come on into the living room"

All of the curtains were drawn and she only switched on a dim lamp. "If you sit in the chair by the piano, nobody will be able to see you from outside."

He did as he was told. "I didn't expect you to be so forthright about this, ma'am."

"Marlie," she reminded him gently. "Like I said, I've been expecting you. You and the cavalry, actually, so I guess I'm relieved that you're alone."

"I'd never bring the Army into anything, if I could help it," Brad said seriously, and Marlie laughed.

"You Marines are such snobs." Brad watched as she handed him a coaster, and then put one down for herself, carefully placing her glass on it. She perched on the end of a wing chair, looking like she was ready to spring up at any moment. Defensive posturing, Brad thought. She probably never let her guard down: her sense of self-security would have been the first thing she lost.

"Well, Brad. Now that you're here, what are your plans for me?" Her tone was still casual, but her eyes were deep pools of terror, and she was trembling slightly.

"I don't have any. At least not yet. Why don't you just tell me about it, first, and then we'll see what can be done."

"What do you want to know?" She looked scared but determined, and Brad was relieved. He was going to help her, regardless, but it wouldn't work as well if she wasn't yet ready to help herself.

"Whatever you can tell me. When it started, how often, what he does. What you want to tell me."

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and when she opened them, he understood how long she'd been waiting to talk about her life, how much she needed to do so. "It started about three months after we got married. Jeff had just made corporal and had applied to Recon. We were dressing to go to the Marine Corps Ball, and he didn't like the way I'd done my make-up. He said it made me look cheap. He didn't hit me then, just grabbed my arms and squeezed them until I said I'd change it. I had to wear long sleeves for a month. God. I was so young – I'd just graduated from college and was working at my first job, and nobody had ever touched me with anything but love. He apologized so beautifully and brought me flowers for a week. I didn't think it would happen again."

For the next hour, Brad didn't say anything. He sat and listened as Marlie told him how Jeff grew more and more physically violent toward her. He escalated from squeezing to slapping, from slapping to punching, from punching to kicking. He beat her with his belt, with ropes, the butt of his handgun. She was hospitalized four times in two years, each time paying cash and using her maiden name so she couldn't be linked back to Jeff. He criticized everything she did, everybody she knew, until it was easier just to stop going out. She couldn't keep taking medical leave, so she quit her job and started her own trading business from home. He'd never tried to stop her working, he liked the money too much.

There would be periods of calm, in which he'd be affectionate and gentle, and she'd think that maybe it was over. But something always set him off again: problems at work, a high credit card bill from their vacation, once a broken plate. She learned to move quietly and carefully, trying to escape notice. She'd thought that they might have a baby, but once he started hitting her in the gut, she had a tubal litigation while he was on tour. She was already all alone, and then he told her that he was being transferred. For a split second, she thought maybe he was going to leave her, but then she realized he meant that _they_ were being transferred. She would be in a strange new place, Jeff would feel like he was under even more pressure at work, and nothing would get better.

He raped her for the first time when he got back from Iraq. She couldn't get out of bed for week, and he tended to her, and told her that if she'd been the wife he needed to her to be, he wouldn't have had to do that. She'd being trying for years to be that woman, whatever she was, and she knew by then that she never would be what he wanted, that it wasn't possible. She didn't make friends, or go out except to get things for the house. When she was well enough, she would swim in the ocean. She'd go far out and think about how easy it would be to drown, how quiet and peaceful, but she didn't want die, not really.

"I just wanted it to stop," she said finally, dry-eyed and distant. Brad had seen that look on POWs after they'd come home, on children living in a country that had not known peace in their lifetime, on men who were the only ones of their team to live through battle. "But if I leave, he'll find me and he'll kill me. If I go to the Corps for help, he'll kill me. There is no way out for me, Brad, but one. And I don't want my life to end that way."

He hadn't looked away from as she told him her story. If she could tell him all this without flinching, the least he could do was return the favor. He was already angry when she started talking, and by the time she was done, he was enraged, hotter with fury than he'd ever been.

Every time he'd been pissed at the Corps for putting his men in danger paled in comparison to how he felt then. Command fucked up, but that's because it was staffed with idiots. Jeff Stowe wasn't stupid, and he clearly understood what he was doing to her. He used everything he'd learned in the Corps against his wife, and he'd broken her. She hadn't surrendered yet, not completely, but there were only so many times you could go down before you didn't get up again.

"I can help you get out," he said, when he thought he could talk in an even, soothing voice again. "I need some time, but I'll get you so far away from him, he'll think you're on Mars."

"Brad – " she stopped and really looked at him. "Do you really think you can? Without the Corps finding out, without him losing his career?"

"Yes," said Brad. "I do. He's going to lose that anyway, but when he does, it won't have anything to do. Give me some time, Marlie, and you'll never see him again."

"I believe you," she said, in a tone full of surprise. "I've never met you before, but I've heard of you. You're Jeff's goddamn hero, for Christ's sake. I shouldn't believe you, because it looks so impossible to me, but I do."

"Impossible is my specialty," he said, standing. "However it happens, it's going to be a covert op. Keep your head down and wait for my signal, okay? I won't take very long to unfuck this, I promise."

She nodded. "Don't do anything stupid. It's not worth it."

What she meant was that she wasn't worth it, and he disagreed mightily. But he just smiled at her, bent down and pressed a soft kiss on her cheek, and left, leaving on the same darkened route by which he'd arrived.

He got into the jeep, but didn't start it right away. Marlie lived in the dark, hiding in the shadows so she wouldn't be seen. She moved like a stranger in her own house, afraid to move anything or even touch anything lest she set off her husband. It was like living a non-stop nightmare, and he didn't know how she'd borne it so long without going crazy. As he had last night, he thought about the way Ray moved around their home, how he'd gone though his nightly routine without thought, taking care of their home like he'd done even with Brad gone.

Ray wasn't wifely, but they shared had shared a life for a long time now. Brad had been home for a month now, and this situation put him back in the thick of the worst of the Corps. He was feeling right at home, dealing with it, but he realized that the only thing that hadn't felt strange the first two weeks back was Ray. And Ray might have grown up, but he hadn't changed so much that Brad couldn't still find him, find who they were together.

Marlie was still a hell of a woman, and Brad could imagine what she'd been like before her life had become a living hell. Jeff Stowe was a fucking idiot for failing to appreciate that, and Brad was going to make him pay for trying to destroy the one person he'd vowed to protect above all others. But first he had to get her out of the line of fire.

*

Brad did his ground work. Domestic violence wasn't a new problem for the Marine Corps, not by far. Put men in situations where they are required to act violently in order to survive, leave him there for months with other men who also rely on violence for their survival, and violence will become a normalized, conditioned response to any stressor.

The Corps has programs in place for when that violence erupted on the homefront: help lines, websites, seminars for both commanders and at-risk Marines, and a fuckload of brochures. Brad had yet to encounter any problem outside combat that the military establishment does not first try to answer with ream and reams of paperwork. He was sure the brochures and websites were carefully worded by social workers and psychologists, that those same well-trained people answered the help lines and led the seminars and walked families through the process of recovery.

It was also possible that the brochures promising help and support crossed paths with the bullshit psy ops writers, and that all the help lines were manned by the same person. That font looked awfully familiar.

His CO looked up at him with somber eyes. McGilbert had been in ten years already, had one tour in Iraq and two in Afghanistan., the last one while Brad was there with the RM. They'd worked together on an op in Dai Chopan, and Brad had requested to join his company when the exchange was over. "You want to go to the session being held tomorrow? Problems at home, Brad?"

Not in my fucking house, Brad thought, and it must have shown on his face, because the captain was nodding even before Brad calmly said, "No, sir."

"I didn't think so." That was the closet they had ever come to discussing Brad's home life. McGilbert probably knew about Ray – hard to keep something like that secret from a Recon Marine, especially one who worked with other Recon Marines – but he wouldn't ask, and it didn't seem to matter. There'd never once been a moment that Brad thought his CO considered him anything less than a warrior even though he lived with a man and probably took it up the ass at least once in a while. In his more generous moments, Brad thought this was how Clinton meant DADT to work, a baby step toward opening up the thousands of closets occupied by gay service people.

"A problem with one of the men, then." It wasn't a question. Brad didn't say anything, but he didn't look away, either. Eyes forward, face blank. They both knew that McGilbert could order Brad to tell him what he knew and Brad would do so, because as much as he wanted to help Marlie, he lived by a certain code.

McGilbert looked hard at him for a minute, and then sighed. "You will tell me if you need my help." That was an order and Brad nodded. "Absolutely, sir."

"Good." McGilbert signed the FSP request form and handed it back to Brad. "I hope this helps," he said, his tone conveying that he didn't think it would do jack-shit.

His CO had been dead-on. The seminar didn't help Brad one goddamn bit. In principle, the Family Advocacy Program seemed thorough and effective. It was, however, goddamn slow. Interviews with both parties, both together and separate, home visits, potential counseling. There wasn't anything in there that could protect Marlie immediately, and there was no way to keep reports of the abuse off Stowe's permanent record. He'd be finished in Recon, if not the Marines entirely.

Brad didn't give a fuck what happened to Stowe, but he believed Marlie's assertion that he'd find her and kill her if she brought that about. He even stayed after the session was over and asked the instructor a few questions, and while the answers she gave him toed the party line, her eyes were hard and sad. At the end of their chat, she looked up at him and said, "I doubt I need to tell you this, Brad, but the Marine Corps is a unit. One large unit made up of thousands of little units, and families are the foundation of that unit. If one of those units falls apart, Command worries the whole thing is going to come tumbling down. So the Corps will do whatever it can to protect its unity at all levels. Do you follow, Gunny?"

He nodded. "Solid copy, ma'am."

She smiled at him, tired and strong. "Good luck, Marine."

Time to pursue less official channels, then. Brad stopped by Mike Wynn's house on his way home. Ray had a late lab, and Shara could always be counted on to have cooked enough to feel a platoon.

Sure enough, she greeted him at the door with a huge smile. "Well, hello, stranger. We just don't see enough of you around here since you got back."

After a day spent looking at pictures of bruised and broken women, her warm smile and honeyed voice was like a balm. He swung her up into a hug, grinning as she squealed and held on tight. "That's a situation we can remedy easily enough. Sunnyside Motel, room eleven. Tomorrow noon?"

She giggled and kissed his cheek. "You gonna bring your boy or should I bring mine?"

"I'm not man enough for you, Shar? You wound me."

"Put my wife down, Colbert, or you're goin' to know real pain," Mike drawled behind her. "And I don't wanna have to nurse Person's broken heart if you decide to start playing for our team again."

Shara copped a feel of his ass as he put her down, and Brad raised his eyebrows at Mike. "I can't be blamed for the fact that your wife is a shameless flirt, Mike."

"She only does it around you all. When she said she liked a man in uniform, I didn't think she'd apply it across the board."

Shara grinned up at him. "I tell him that, and what does he do but drag me around the world to bases with thousands of men in uniform. I don't know what else he expected." She grinned at them. "I'm goin' to go see to dinner. You're staying, Brad?"

"Not if it puts you out, ma'am."

She rolled her eyes. "You stop by here at this time of day, you don't think I know what you've really got on your mind? You're staying. Mike, get the man a beer."

Mike led him out to the backyard and they say by the pool with their drinks, shooting the shit for a while. Mike had made it to his twenty and then retired as a First Sergeant. He'd taken six months off and then accepted a lucrative contract with as a consultant to a civilian contractor. "'Bout time somebody besides Shara made some real money around here," he'd said. There were days Brad could imagine that kind of life for himself and Ray, easy living without the constant specter of the next deployment, the next long separation. Other times he knew he'd never really leave, that the Corps was as vital to him as air and water.

"Much as we enjoy your company, Brad, I can't help but thinkin' that there's something on your mind that brings you by," Mike said. "We've got about fifteen minutes until she's got those burgers ready for me to grill, so you might want to spit it out."

Brad nodded. He hadn't told anybody about Marlie except Ray, but Mike was as trustworthy as they came. "You know Jeff Stowe?" It was rhetorical: Mike knew every single man in Recon down to the blood type on their dog tags.

" One of yours, ain't he? Short wiry blond guy, out of Lejeune. Came to us as a corporal." Mike said. "Made team leader just before I left."

"Yeah." Brad took a long pull of his beer. "He beats his wife."

"Shit." Mike drank, too. "Is this just scuttlebutt or have you confirmed the intel?"

"From what I can tell, he's done such a good job of shutting her up that there isn't even a whisper of it. Unless you've heard something along the way?"

Mike shook his head. "She always kept herself apart from the other wives, earned herself a reputation as an uppity bitch. They don't live on base, have some place down by the beach. She works from home, I think, some kind of trader. Makes herself a fair bit of money, which didn't help her none around here. But that wouldn't have mattered if she hadn't been trying to keep herself apart."

That was the part that hadn't made much sense to Brad. "Wouldn't she want some kind of support system, people she could lean on when Jeff knocked her around?" Brad's sisters had always been surrounded by friends, even his mother had girlfriends she went to when she couldn't talk to anybody else. The idea that Marlie didn't have anybody else was downright mystifying to him."Somebody who knows what it's like to live with one of us? They'd take care of her."

"You're thinking about this like it's a really bad blow-out, the kind where you end up sleeping on the couch for a night or two." Mike got out two more beer from the cooler by his feet and handed one to Brad. "What we're lookin' at here is long-term, systematic abuse intended to isolate her completely so she doesn't need anybody but him. Think SERE, not _Mad About You_."

Brad couldn't help it: " _Mad About You_ , Mike? With the hot blonde and the dog?"

Mike shrugged. "Shara loved that show. My point is that she couldn't let anybody get that close to her. How can she trust them? Say her friend gets worried, says something to her man about a bruise she saw on Marlie. Next day, all of Recon is talkin' about her two black eyes. She's built herself a fightin' hole, so she can see all positions at once. At least that way she knows where the next attack is coming from."

Mike paused. "Gotta admire her strategic plan, especially in a company full of men who are trained to get in and out of places without being seen. You probably scared the hell out of her, infiltrating her perimeter like that. You can bet she's been shittin' herself about what you're gonna do"

"You know a lot about this, Mike." Brad observed.

"My daddy was a mean sumbitch. I saw my mother do it for her whole life." Mike shook his head. "Ancient history. The question is, what are you going to do about it now that you know?"

"Fuck if I know," Brad said, rubbing his hand over his eyes. "I went to the Family Support Center today for a seminar on domestic abuse."

"You find it about as useful as combat orders from Godfather?"

"At least he got us on the fucking airfield. I follow a single policy laid out by these people, and I've got a dead body on my hands. Hers, maybe, but it could just as well be his."

"You think she's at that point?" Mike asked.

Brad nodded, thinking of the look in Marlie's eyes. It was more than just desperation and fear. "I think she knows that at some point, somebody's going to get carried out in a body bag, and she's determined it's not going to be her."

"That's how it goes sometimes," Mike said, looking as tired as Brad felt. "We dealt with this a lot after the first time we were over there. Sometimes it was enough to have a talk with the Marine. We'd sit them down with somebody like you, somebody who had balls enough to follow through on what they said, and explain to them what it means to be a Marine. Or else somebody crazy enough to make them too scared to do it again. Swarr was damn useful, times like this."

Brad had seen Swarr in a bar fight or two. He'd be a damn effective deterrent. "That's not going to work here. I've read Stowe's pysch evals. He thinks he's invincible."

"Yeah." Mike nodded. "He's the type who's not just cocky, he's a bit touched. So walking her out of there, surrounded by every member of his platoon, won't work either."

But something would work. Brad could tell just looking at Mike that there was another way. They were Recon Marines: there was always another way. "So what do we do?"

"Pop smoke and extraction," Mike said. "We get him looking in another direction and we get her the hell out of there. By the time he knows what happened, she needs to be halfway across the country. Hell, if she's got the kind of money we think she does, halfway across the world. New name, new life. You think we can do that, Gunnery Sergeant"

Brad nodded, the logistics unfolding in front of him. "Yeah. I think we can manage that."

*

In the end, it was one of the best ops of Brad's career, elegant in its simplicity. The first step was getting rid of Jeff long enough to give Marlie a good enough head start. Brad reviewed files and found that Hasser was missing thirty hours of jump instruction: his course had been cut short when hostilities started in Afghanistan. He suggested to McGilbert that all the TLs could use some retraining in that area, given that they'd been alerted there would be jumps in upcoming missions in the more remote mountainous areas of Afghanistan. McGilbert didn't ask any more questions, just commended Brad for his foresight, pulled some strings, and within a week, Stowe was packed off to Fort Benning with the other team leaders. They'd be gone at least nine days, and Brad had a buddy at Benning who'd agreed to slow down their retraining as much as possible, so Brad could count on three more on top of that.

The second part of his plan could be executed concurrently with arranging for Jeff to be away: procuring fake identification for Marlie. Brad called Poke and suggested that some of his friends from the old neighborhood might be able to help them out there. Poke lectured Brad for his the blatant racism of his request; how it grievously injured Poke that Brad would automatically assume that he would know low-lifes like that, after all he'd done to pull himself out of the barrio, and how outrageous it was that his Mexican brethren had to stoop to such levels to put food on the table for their families.

Brad put him on speaker phone and waxed his board, occasionally throwing in an insult when Poke took a breath. After about twenty minutes, Poke allowed about how he might have a cousin who knew a guy who did fucking brilliant ID work. A white boy like Brad would be killed before he even walked into the door of that establishment, Iceman or not, but Poke would act as the go-between, because that was just the kind of upstanding guy he was, as long as Brad never breathed a word of any of this to Tina. Five days later, Brad came home to find a set of amazingly credible identification and credit cards on his kitchen table and Poke's kids swimming in his pool.

Mike was right: Marlie had money tucked away. She'd been on Wall Street for ten years: she knew all about making money that nobody else could see and then hiding it away. There was so much of it, in fact, that Brad asked why she hadn't just taken it all and ran. She could have lived on it for the rest of her life, with no problem.

"I didn't know how to do it so that he wouldn't find me," she said. "I left once, the first time he went to Afghanistan, and he tracked me down in two days when he got back. It took me two months to heal from what he did to me."

"Fuck, we are going to end this asshole," said Ray, when Brad told him about that. "I almost want to re-enlist so I can get at him through Recon. On the other hand, he's got you on his ass now, and that's a position I wouldn't want to be in a million years"

*

Jeff left the next day, and Brad hung around the airstrip. He needed to see Jeff board the plane, and he watched it take off and disappear into the clouds. Five hours later, his contact at Fort Benning confirmed that his Marines had safely arrived in Georgia, all accounted for, and Brad went to Marlie's house for the last time.

She was sitting on the back deck, staring out at the ocean. She tried to stand when Brad came around the back, but Jeff had left her with a reminder of how he expected her to behave while he was away. Three broken ribs and a fractured tibia where he'd kicked her with his boots on instead of a fucking kiss on the cheek. Brad sat in the emergency room and contemplated the various ways he was going to make Jeff Stowe regret he'd ever been born, the least of which was having him kicked out of Recon. By the time Brad was finished with him, he was going to _beg_ to be transferred to H &S Company.

Marlie came out of the curtained area with a walking cast, holding herself stiffly. Brad had broken a rib or two in his time and he knew that no matter how well she was bandaged, every breath would be excruciating for the first few days. "They didn't give you anything for the pain?" he asked, looking her over.

She pulled a bottle of Vicodin out of her purse but looked at Brad defiantly. It was the first time he'd truly seen her look fierce, and she wore it well. "I am not taking a single one of these until I am sitting in my new apartment on the Left Bank," she said, quietly so only he could hear. "I want to remember every moment of this day, and not through the glaze of an opiate."

Ray's friend Madison was waiting in a car just outside the hospital entrance. She'd donned a bright pink wig, covered it with a head scarf, and wore the biggest sunglasses he'd ever seen. Like Brad had instructed, she was noticeable but disguised. Even if Jeff got a description of the getaway driver when he went looking for Marlie, he'd never be able to track her down. The car was borrowed from one of the guys in Ray's band, and like everything else, not something Jeff would ever be able to track down. A snatch and grab in broad daylight, like only true Recon Marines could manage.

Brad stood in the hospital lobby, a ball cap covering his hair, and looked down at Marlie. "You remember the plan?"

She grinned. It was the first time he'd seen her really smile, and it looked damn good on her. "It's pretty straightforward from here on out, isn't it? Cut and color my hair, change my name, and never make contact with any of you again."

"And get help," he said. "There's a list of excellent French therapists in your itinerary. Use it."

She looked up at him, her eyes watering. "I have no idea why they call you the Iceman," she said, reaching up and petting his cheek. "You the sweetest guy I've ever met in my life. Thank you so much, Brad. I couldn't make this happen for myself but you just pulled it all off like it was easy as pie."

Brad smiled at her. "You're the one who survived, Marlie. You lived in a war zone, and showed the kind of courage that usually merits a medal or two."

She nodded and turned away. He watched her walk to the car and get in. As they drove away, Marlie turned back to him and blew him a kiss.

"I told you that you were Bravo's last superhero, Brad. You need to listen to me more," said Ray, coming out of the gift shop where Brad has placed him as back-up. "You saved the girl, you're gonna fucking tear that guy from limb to limb – metaphorically of course. We're going to have to get you some pointy ears and a cape."

Brad grinned. "Are you Robin or the Joker?" he asked. "Because I'm not into kids, and clowns scare me."

"You're full of shit," said Ray as they walked out of the hospital into the darkening night. "I really hate having to feel your ego like this, but nothing fucking scares you."

It was dark in the parking lot and there wasn't anybody else around. Brad took Ray's hand. "I've got one hell of a wingman," he said, not looking at Ray. "Without him, I'm not sure I'd see the all the evil forces I have to defeat."

They got to Ray's car and Brad turned to him and squeezed his hand. "One hell of a wingman."

*

Three months later, a postcard of the Eiffel Tower came in the mail. Brad flipped it over and there was no return address, and only one typed word. _Merci._


End file.
